7. William Novak and Moshe Waldoks, eds., The Big Book of Jewish Humor: 25th Anniversary (New York: HarperCollins, 2006), xxv.
8. Graham Turner, “Understanding the Jews,” Daily Telegraph, April 10, 2001.
9. Novak and Waldoks, The Big Book of Jewish Humor, xlv.
10. Davies treats this aside as a categorical conclusion and “demonstrates” its “error” by citing self-critical joking among Scots in the late nineteenth century—without, however, comparing its proportion in the two cultures. See Christie Davies, “Undertaking a Comparative Study of Humor,” in The Primer of Humor Research, ed. Victor Raskin (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2008), 175; Christie Davies, The Mirth of Nations (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2002), 51–75.
11. Elliott Oring, Jokes and Their Relations (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2010), 116. The footnote cites Hermann Adler, “Jewish Wit and Humor,” Nineteenth Century 33 (1893): 457–69.
12. Leonard J. Greenspoon, ed., Jews and Humor (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2011).
13. Hillel Halkin, “Why Jews Laugh at Themselves,” Commentary 121, no. 4 (April 2006): 47–54.
14. Ariela Krasney, The Badkhan [Hebrew] (Ramat-Gan: Bar Ilan University, 1998).
15. Heinrich Heine, “Prinzessin Sabbat,” translated literally, with insightful discussion, by S. S. Prawer in Heine’s Jewish Comedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 554–55. For a versified translation, see, for example, Heinrich Heine, “Princess Sabbath,” trans. Aaron Kramer, in The Poetry and Prose of Heinrich Heine, ed. Frederic Ewen (New York: Citadel Press, 1948), 264.
16. See Mendele Mocher Sforim, Di kliatshe, trans. “The Mare,” in Joachim Neugroschel, The Great Works of Jewish Fantasy and Occult (Woodstock, NY: Overlook, 1986): 545–663.
17. Lee Berk and Stanley Tan, interview in Humor and Health Journal (September–October 1996). Based on Lee Berk and Stanley Tan, “Neuroendocrine Influences of Mirthful Laughter,” American Journal of the Medical Sciences 298 (October 1989): 390–96.
18. See “Laughter Is the Best Medicine,” http://helpguide.org/life/humor_laughter_health.htm.
19. Sholem Aleichem, “The Haunted Tailor,” trans. Leonard Wolf, in The Best of Sholem Aleichem, ed. Irving Howe and Ruth R. Wisse (Washington, DC: New Republic Books, 1979), 36.
20. Albert Goldman, Ladies and Gentlemen—Lenny Bruce!! (New York: Random House, 1974), 106.
21. Isaac Babel, “Gedali,” in Collected Stories, trans. David McDuff (London: Penguin, 1994), 118.
1. German Lebensraum
1. Theodor Herzl, Old-New Land, trans. Lotta Levensohn, preface Jacques Kornberg (Princeton, NJ: M. Wiener, 1997), 12. I have retained the spelling of names, minus the umlaut, in the quoted text.
2. Ibid., 173.
3. Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1960), 74–75, 137–38, 134. The last of these jokes appears as an episode in King of the Schnorrers (see chapter 3).
4. Ibid., 55.
5. Ibid., 133.
6. Freud proposed the English title “Man’s Discomfort in Civilization” for Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, translated by James Strachey as Civilization and Its Discontents (New York: W. W. Norton, 1961). That Freud owed nothing to Herzl in his understanding of anti-Semitism is clear from this discussion of people’s instinct for aggression:
The advantage which a comparatively small cultural group offers of allowing this instinct an outlet in the form of hostility against intruders is not to be despised. It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness…. In this respect the Jewish people, scattered everywhere, have rendered most useful services to the civilizations of the countries that have been their hosts. (Ibid., 61)
7. “Heinrich Heine is one of the most controversial figures in the history of German literature, some would argue the most controversial,” observed George F. Peters (The Poet as Provocateur: Heinrich Heine and His Critics [Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2000], 1).
8. Heinrich Heine, “Ein Fichtenbaum,” in Sämtliche Gedichte, ed. Bernd Kortlander (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam jun, 1997), 94. For alternate translations, see Web site of Ralph Dumain, http://www.autodidactproject.org/other/heinepoem.html.
9. Translated by Emma Lazarus, http://www.autodidactproject.org/other/heinepoem.html.
10. Heinrich Heine, “The Baths of Lucca,” in Travel Pictures, trans. Peter Wortsman (Brooklyn, NY: Archipelago Books, 2008), 125. Freud first drew my attention to this work.
11. The original here reads “ohne Furcht vor Mesallianz,” that is, “without fear of misalliance.”
12. Heine, “The Baths of Lucca,” 100–101.
13. Ibid., 107.
14. Ibid., 104. The punning is obviously better in the original book, Reisebilder (Zurich: Diogenes Verlag, 1993), 332–33.
15. Freud’s use of this quotation—and “appropriation of Heine’s voice”—is analyzed by Sander Gilman as part of his study The Jew’s Body (New York: Routledge, 1991), which also includes a discussion of how “the Jewish nose” and other features of Jewish physiognomy figured negatively in notions of identity.
16. Jefferson S. Chase, in his partial translation of “The Baths of Lucca,” coins the term “goyraffes” to catch the flavor of the untranslatable pun; see his Inciting Laughter: The Development of “Jewish Humor” in 19th Century German Culture (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2000), 270.
17. Heine, “The Baths of Lucca,” 145.
18. Sigmund S. Prawer, Heine’s Jewish Comedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 155.
19. Hans Mayer, “Der Streit zwischen Heine und Platen,” in Aussenseiter (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2007), 222.
20. Heine, “The Baths of Lucca,” 160.
21. Werner Sollors, personal communication with author, June 8, 2012.
22. Heine, “The Baths of Lucca,” 128.
23. Franz Kafka, “Ein Bericht für eine Akademie,” in Der Jude, November 1917, translated as “A Report to an Academy” in Willa Muir and Edwin Muir, trans., Selected Short Stories of Franz Kafka, intro. Philip Rahv (New York: Modern Library, 1952). Of several additional translations, the latest and crispest is in Joyce Crick, trans., A Hunger Artist and Other Stories, intro. and notes Ritchie Robertson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 37–45. Nonetheless, the quotations, except where indicated, are from the Muirs’ translation.
24. Prawer, Heine’s Jewish Comedy, 319.
25. Muir and Muir, Selected Short Stories of Franz Kafka, 169, 168.
26. Ibid., 176.
27. Ibid., 173.
28. Crick, A Hunger Artist and Other Stories, 45. The nature of the ape’s “pleasure” in the half-trained chimpanzee is made much more explicit in this translation.
29. Nahman Syrkin, “Heinrich Heine, the Tragic Jewish Poet” [Yiddish, trans. from Hebrew], in Heinrich Heine, Verk (New York: Farlag Yidish, 1918), 1:7. Not surprisingly, as theorist and founder of labor Zionism, Syrkin puts forth a view of German Jewish humor that has something in common with Herzl’s.
2. Yiddish Heartland
1. Sholem Aleichem, “Two Anti-Semites,” trans. Miriam Waddington, in The Best of Sholem Aleichem, ed. Irving Howe and Ruth R. Wisse (Washington, DC: New Republic Books, 1979), 116.
2. Selma H. Fraiberg, The Magic Years: Understanding and Handling the Problems of Early Childhood (1959; repr., New York: Fireside 1996), 18.
3. Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks, The Complete 2000 Year Old Man (Los Angeles, CA: Rhino Records, 1994), part 1.
4. Yosef Haim Brenner, “On Sholem Aleichem” (1946), in Proof-texts 6, no. 1 (January 1986): 17.
5. Joseph Perl, Revealer of Secrets, trans. with intro. and notes Dov Taylor (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997), 25. Although Taylor draws heavily from the scholarship of those working directly with Perl’s original Hebrew and Yiddish, his English translation constitutes the most thoroughgoing edition of
the work to date.
6. Shloyme Ettinger’s (1803–56) Serkele, published posthumously in 1861, became a showcase for actresses on the Yiddish stage.
7. Abraham Goldfaden, “The Two Kuni-Lemls,” in Landmark Yiddish Plays, ed. Joel Berkowitz and Jeremy Dauber (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), 234 (act 2, scene 7).
8. I am indebted for this interpretation to Alyssa Quint, “Naked Truths,” in Arguing the Modern Jewish Canon: Essays on Literature and Culture … (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 555.
9. Ora Wiskind-Elper, Tradition and Fantasy in the Tales of Reb Nahman of Bratslav (New York: State University of New York Press, 1998), 180.
10. The Kotsk homily can be found in Louis I. Newman, trans. and ed., The Hasidic Anthology (New York: Bloch, 1944), 499–500.
11. Paul Oppenheimer, Till Eulenspiegel: His Adventures (New York: Singer Routledge, 2001), 69–71.
12. “Ir zayt bavornt” [You are secured], in Ozer Holdes, ed., Stories, Jokes, and Pranks of Hershl Ostropolier [Yiddish], (Kiev: Melukhe farlag far di natsionale minderhaytn in USSR, 1941), 115–16. This collection, issued under Soviet aegis, sharpens the anticlerical and anti-“capitalist” bite of Hershele’s humor. At the other extreme is the softened impression of Hershele in Yehiel Yeshaia Trunk’s fictional account of his youth, The Merriest Jew in the World [Yiddish] (Buenos Aires: Yidbukh, 1953).
13. Chaim Bloch, Hersch Ostropoler, ein jüdischer Till-Eulenspiegel des 18. Jahrhunderts, seine Geschichten und Streiche (Berlin: Harz, 1921), 10.
14. As it happens, the copy of the book of Isaiah discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls spells the word with the letter vav, which would make bonayikh the correct reading. See David Flusser, Judaism of the Second Temple Period: (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2007), 170. But the tradition distinctly presents this as a creative misreading.
15. My main sources for these anecdotes are Yehoshua Hana Ravnitzki, Yidishe vitsn [Jewish jokes] [Yiddish] (1921–22; repr., New York: Shklarski, 1950); Alter Druyanov, Sefer habedikha vehakhidur [Jewish jokes and humor] [Hebrew], 3 vols. (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1939). Both of these books organize their material according to subject. Earlier I cite Immanuel Olsvanger’s two edited collections: Royte Pomerantsen: Jewish Folk Humor (New York: Schocken, 1947); L’Chayim (New York: Schocken, 1949).
16. Ted Cohen, Jokes (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1999), 17.
17. Heard from, or rather seen performed by, Allan L. Nadler, Association for Jewish Studies conference, Boston, 2010.
18. Marvin S. Zuckerman and Gershon Weltman, trans., Yiddish Sayings Mama Never Taught You (Van Nuys, CA: Perivale Press, 1969). English translation published on facing pages with Ignatz Bernstein, ed., Yidishe shprikhverter un redensarten [Collection of coarse and vulgar sayings] (Leipzig, 1908).
19. Shirley Kumove, More Words, More Arrows (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999), 24. See also her earlier collection, Words Like Arrows: A Collection of Yiddish Folk Sayings (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984), and its bibliographic note.
20. One day my mother said to my husband, “You know, a son-in-law is like a button on an overcoat: it can fall off,” leaving him to wonder whether she was picking a fight or making a philosophical observation.
21. Sholem Aleichem, The Letters of Menakhem-Mendl and Sheyne-Sheyndl and Motl the Cantor’s Son, trans. and intro. Hillel Halkin (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 24.
22. Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1960), 95.
23. Sholem Aleichem, “The Tenth Man,” in Tevye the Dairyman and the Railroad Stories, trans. and intro. Hillel Halkin (New York: Schocken, 1987), 274–75.
24. Ibid., 278–79.
25. Ravnitzki, Yidishe vitsn, 28–29.
26. Ibid., 29.
27. Itzik Manger, “Abraham and Sarah,” in The World According to Itzik: Selected Poetry and Prose, trans. and ed. Leonard Wolf (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 11.
28. Ibid., 43. “Lomir beyde antloyfn keyn vin/un lomir a khupe shteln.” Itsik Manger, “Di elegye fun Fastrigosa,” in Medresh Itsik (Jerusalem: Magnes Press of the Hebrew University, 1984), 147.
29. [Yitzhok] Bashevis, “Gimpel Tam,” Yidisher Kemfer, no. 593 (March 30, 1945): 17–20. Translated by Saul Bellow for Partisan Review 20 (May 1953): 300–313. Bellow recounted that Singer turned down his offer to translate more of his fiction on the (perhaps tongue-in-cheek) explanation that people would attribute its accomplishment to the better-known translator.
30. A composite English version can be found under that title in Nathan Ausubel, ed., A Treasury of Jewish Folklore (New York: Crown Publishers, 1948), 327–31.
31. Sholem Aleichem, “The Haunted Tailor,” trans. Leonard Wolf, in The Best of Sholem Aleichem, ed. Irving Howe and Ruth R. Wisse (Washington, DC: New Republic Books, 1979), 36. The tailor of the title “Der farkishefter shnayder” has been variously translated as “enchanted” and “bewitched,” harking back yet again to Heine’s image of the Jew who is under an evil spell.
3. The Anglosphere
1. Music by Jule Styne, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, book by Arthur Laurents; project of David Merrick and Ethel Merman. All were Jews.
2. Julian, Contra Galilaeos, in Greek and Latin Authors on Jews and Judaism, ed., intro., trans., and comm. Menahem Stern (Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1976–84): 2:84.
3. Israel Zangwill, The King of the Schnorrers, illustrated by George Hutchison (1894; repr., London: Henry Pordes, 1998). References are to the following: Lord George Gordon (1751–93), British Member of Parliament, led the anti-Catholic riots, was excommunicated from the Church of England in 1786, and was suspected of madness when he converted to Judaism the following year; the shared trust of Christians in biblical prophecy allowed them to extend to Jews just enough civic rights to enrich their treasury; the Gentleman’s Magazine (founded in 1731) opposed the “infidel alien” outright; the state did not recognize marriages and bequests executed according to Jewish religious law; and Primrose Day, April 19, named after Benjamin Disraeli’s favorite flower, commemorates the death of that former prime minister in 1881. Had anyone prophesied that England would one day mourn its Jewish prime minister (albeit one whose family had converted), they would have been considered seditious. Yet William Pitt the Younger, who was prime minister during the action of the novel, was glad to take advice behind the scenes from another Jewish Benjamin—Goldsmid (1755–1808)—who helped finance England’s military campaigns against France during the French Revolutionary Wars (1792–99). During Tevele Schiff’s tenure as rabbi of London’s Great Synagogue (1764–91), the mystic Samuel Falk achieved notoriety by putting into the synagogue’s doorposts magical inscriptions that were said to have saved the building from being destroyed by fire; a former choir boy of the synagogue named John Braham (who had changed his name from Abraham) composed a song for tenors called “The Death of Nelson,” commemorating the naval hero who perished at the battle of Trafalgar in 1805.
4. Ibid., 2.
5. Ibid., 48.
6. Stephen Potter, The Sense of Humour (London: Max Reinhardt, 1954), 54.
7. Ibid., 51ff.
8. Richard Raskin, Life Is Like a Glass of Tea: Studies of Classic Jewish Jokes (Aarhus, Denmark: Aarhus University Press, 1992), 101–19.
9. Ibid., 109.
10. Saul Bellow, ed., Great Jewish Short Stories (New York: Dell, 1963), 12.
11. Ibid., 11–12. This joke may owe something to the quip attributed to Austrian satirist Moritz Saphir: “When I was a Jew, God could see me but I could not see Him. When I became a Catholic, I could see God, but He could not see me. Now that I am a Protestant, He can’t see me and I can’t see Him.”
12. Leo Rosten, “Groucho: The Man from Marx,” in The Many Worlds of Leo Rosten (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), 14–20.
13. Leo Rosten, The Return of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N (New York
: Harper, 1959), 58.
14. Leonard Q. Ross, The Education of Hyman Kaplan (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1937), 90.
15. Leo Rosten, The Joys of Yiddish (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968), 93.
16. Irwin Richman, Sullivan County Borscht Belt: Images of America (Charleston, SC: Arcadia, 2001), 9.
17. Joey Adams with Henry Tobias, The Borscht Belt (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966), 63, 68.
18. “Red Buttons Roasts Frank,” video, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyO0VWdUfRo.
19. Philip Roth, George Plimpton interview on Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), reprinted in Reading Myself and Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux).
20. Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint (New York: Random House, 1969), 185.
21. From the 1975 film Love and Death.
22. Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint, 257.
23. Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint, 79.
24. William Novak and Moshe Waldoks, eds., The Big Book of Jewish Humor: 25th Anniversary (New York: HarperCollins, 2006). Jokes attributed to, respectively, Jonathan Katz and Joel Chasnoff.
25. See, for example, “Philip Roth and the Jews: An Exchange,” New York Review of Books, November 14, 1974. The piece reproduces in full Syrkin’s original letter to the editor in Commentary, March 1973—a response to Irving Howe’s famously negative “Philip Roth Reconsidered,” Commentary, December 1972. The exchanges between these Jewish intellectuals of the wartime generation and the U.S.-born writer trying to break new literary ground offer stark, poignant insight into the boundaries of humor among Jews themselves when they are separated by different historical experiences and cultural ideals.
26. Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint, 81.
27. Ibid., 168.
28. Ibid., 36–37, 111–12.
29. Ibid., 76.
30. Ibid., 274.
4. Under Hitler and Stalin
1. Shimen Dzigan, The Impact of Jewish Humor [Yiddish] (Tel Aviv: Orly, 1974), 124. I benefited from John Efron’s essay, read in manuscript, “From Lodz to Tel Aviv: The Yiddish Political Satire of Shimen Dzigan and Yisroel Shumacher,” and Yuri Vedenyapin’s dissertation “ ‘Doctors Prescribe Laughter’: The Yiddish Stand-up Comedy of Shimen Dzigan,” Harvard University, 2008.
No Joke Page 21